Tweetdeck's Dreck.ly feature busts open 140 character limit and creates a potential rival to Twitter

Tweetdeck is known as one of the best web apps for Twitter, but could the handy service actually start to rival the social network that it provides a conduit for?

Well possibly and it looks like it’s taking on Twitter on one of its strengths – the 140 character limit that has proved so popular.
Among other features Dreck.ly will bust that open – letting users post and read tweets right up to half a million characters.

People who are accessing Twitter through another interface will see a curtailed version of the tweet and a link to the full post on Dreck.ly.

This is a softly-softly tweak to the service rather than a sabre-rattling announcement, but in many ways what Dreck.ly creates isn’t just a tweak to Twitter but almost a rival service. Building on the original Twitter community it creates a kind of instant blogging platform cum social network that could really take off. There will also be a search engine for all posts stored on the Tweetdeck platform.

Expect software updates next Monday after some testing this afternoon, with Facebook support coming soon.

It is a smart move for Tweetdeck to start doing something new because if Twitter starts developing more of its own native apps for itself – as it has for iPhone and now for Mac, it will wipe out the whole ecosystem of 3rd party twitter apps.